The review is a credible exercise headed by seasoned officials. I have no reason to doubt its essential conclusion that the agency made a herculean effort to get the scheme running in a short timeframe, but that the deadline created capability challenges within the agency. It finds that the NDIA needs to address issues around its information communication technology, staffing, governance and the move to Geelong.

The review nails some issues clearly driven by time. For instance the board did not select the chief executive officer and the CEO did not select his temporary senior executive staff. This is clearly not how a start-up would normally evolve in either the business or community sector.

However I do take issue with the over-egged comparison of the NDIA to “a plane that took off before it had been fully built and is being completed while in the air”. To complete the analogy, the cover of the review even features a picture of a jet in mid-flight with the sky visible through the panels.

The reality is that the NDIS isn’t a single event like a plane taking off. It’s a progressive rollout. We are already taking until 2018/19 to get to the end of the runway.

If we must draw analogies to large vehicles we could also liken it to a ship. It’s possible to do maintenance and refuel at sea without turning around or foundering the boat. We already have launch sites in operation and cannot sail along with parallel service systems for decades.

Delay is not an option. The inequality involved in having completely different outcomes for people side by side in different jurisdictions will quickly become untenable. How will we feel watching children in one region grow up with badly designed wheelchairs that twist their spines while kids thrive next door? Pushing the NDIS out into the 2020s would also push uncertainty into the next decade and raises the spectre of disability services attempting to plan with an uncertain mix of block funding and invoicing when we don’t need them.

The reality is that we can do quick builds when we need to. Medicare came into operation on 1 February 1984, following the passage in September 1983 of the Health Legislation Amendment Act. That’s around six months, so we know Australia is equal to the task of delivering a sustainable nation building reform to tight deadlines if we want to.

Tony Abbott has promised that he will be the infrastructure prime minister and avoid the stumbles associated with stimulus programs. The government has a mandate to get deliver the NDIS fully and on time within the already generous rollout timeframes. We should be vigilant about funding but welcome scrutiny, and work to deliver NDIS properly.